The Center for 21st Century Studies is very grateful to the plenary speakers, breakout session speakers, and all attendees for making After Extinction a quite lively and stimulating conference. With the continuing erosion of public higher education and rejection of intellectual values, we felt quite blessed with this conference to pursue those avenues of knowledge that continue—in the words of The Wisconsin Idea nearly stricken from state statute—to “improve the human condition,” all premised by a “search for truth.”

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What comes after extinction? Our predominant understanding of extinction relates to natural species extinctions caused largely by human actions. But in the 21st century categorical distinctions between humans and nonhumans or culture and nature are no longer tenable.

Today we also think of the extinction of cultural forms, such as languages, customs and traditions, operating systems, and public higher education. In the face of this extended sense of extinction, asking what comes after extinction is not only to inquire about the future of humans and nonhumans, but also to investigate to what extent the concept’s origins still inflect current understandings of extinction.

Moreover, twenty-five speakers will be presenting across several breakout sessions: Animals, Ontologies, Literatures, Deextinction, Waste and What's Left, Games and Afterlife, Capitalism and Labor, Tools and Technolgy, and Indegeneity and Race. There will also be a panel on Art after Extinction, and a tour of the INOVA art exhibition, Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene, with a talk by exhibiting artist Marina Zurkow.

The Nonhuman Turn is the first book to name and consolidate a wide array of current critical, theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the humanities and social sciences under the concept of the nonhuman turn. Each of these approaches is engaged in decentering the human in favor of a concern for the nonhuman, understood by contributors in a variety of ways—in terms of animals, affectivity, bodies, materiality, technologies, and organic and geophysical systems.